According to travel writer and novelist Colin Thubron, the publishing industry made an exciting discovery in the mid-1970s. "They realised that travel writing could also be literature," he says, "which was of course very fortunate for my generation. Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin, Jonathan Raban and myself were hyper-praised for a while. All that has now slightly faded, but I do think that travel writing is still in a healthy state."

One of the key reasons the genre has remained so strong is that Thubron has continued to write travel books. He has published nine in all, as well as six novels. The latest book, In Siberia, gives a lyrical and learned account of this vast and mysterious region, and has again been praised as much for Thubron's literary talents as for his intrepid journeying to impenetrable locations.

Looking at his CV, it seems he was always destined to marry a "natural love of words" with nomadic instincts. As the son of a soldier/diplomat, he travelled all over the world to meet up with his family during school holidays from Eton. He also has a literary pedigree, being a distant relative of the 17th century poet laureate John Dryden. "My mother's maiden name was Dryden," he says, "but he didn't have any immediate family so I'm more of a collateral descendant." At school Thubron remembers other boys reading Biggles or Bulldog Drummond, while he always preferred to write "bad poetry". He then became a publisher, but treated his job as a staging post on his journey to becoming a writer. The career change was duly made when he took a year off to live in Damascus.

"I had been fascinated by the inland cities of Syria for years," he says. "I suppose I chose Damascus as a subject partly because it had been so little written about. But it was a work of love, really. I had no idea whether anyone would publish it." He says that while he admired Freya Stark for "the poetry of her writing", and Patrick Leigh Fermor "for the robustness of his descriptions", it was a fascination for the places themselves that inspired him, not for the people who had written about them. He went on to write another three books about the eastern Mediterranean, and he also began to write fiction.

His first published novel, The God in the Mountain, came in 1977 when Thubron was in his mid-thirties. He freely acknowledges that his fiction doesn't strike many people as the sort of thing a travel writer would produce. "They are often set in enclosed places. I've used a mental hospital, a prison and inside someone's amnesiac head," he says. "They are anti-travel books, if you like, but they give their voice to something in me that a travel book can't. In travel writing your principal fascination is with something outside yourself. With fiction you can much more give voice to your personal life, however heavily disguised, and to all sorts of inner feelings and compulsions."

Having written about Cyprus, Jerusalem and the Lebanon, Thubron ventured further east in 1980 when he travelled around Brezhnev's Russia in a car for his book Among the Russians. He then went behind the bamboo curtain to explore China in Behind the Wall. "I suppose one motive was that I wanted to approach those countries that we in the west had traditionally been brought up to fear: the Russian bear and the yellow peril. But while I wanted to go beyond journalistic clichés, it wasn't an evangelical mission or anything like that. It was more instinct and a desire to satisfy my own curiosity. I wanted to humanise the map."

It has been widely noted that Thubron doesn't push himself to the forefront of his own travel writing. "One of the reasons I seem to retire a bit in the travel books is an anxiety not to push my prejudices too far," he explains. "I do try to subdue or smother my prejudices, although I know you can't do this entirely. You can't really ever pretend to be a disembodied voice of authority. This is particularly true in China. Our whole history and frame of mind is so different to that of China. It is impossible to shake the habits of western mind."

When he went to Siberia he was interested to see how deeply the changes that have transformed the old Soviet Union had penetrated. "This is the part of Russia that is most distant and least reported on, and I wanted to see how small communities were faring. Perhaps naively, I hoped to find that things had survived better than they had done. I thought Siberia, with its traditions of robust independence, might have fared better than other areas of Russia. But I found that this wasn't so."

The practicalities of his work have changed little since he went to Damascus. He writes longhand in notebooks, "which means the level of panic about losing them increases as a trip goes on," he laughs. "I write down everything I know I will forget after a few months. You can remember the general look of the landscape or the broad outcome of a meeting. But you forget the exact expression that someone uses or their intonation. That's what gives life to a description."

He then returns home to London to write it all up. He is currently working on a novel, and says that often happens after he completes a long journey. "When I finish a travel book I want to write some fiction. Equally, after writing a novel I want to go out, meet a billion Chinese people or something like that."